


The Arrow and the Shield

by LuckyDiceKirby



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, y'all ever get sad about fleche
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-20
Updated: 2020-01-20
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:15:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22338382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LuckyDiceKirby/pseuds/LuckyDiceKirby
Summary: Fleche escapes, Felix follows, and Sylvain goes where Felix does.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius & Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 10
Kudos: 107





	The Arrow and the Shield

**Author's Note:**

> is this a felix character study? is this a fleche character study? is it secretly a sylvain character study? who can say! certainly not me!
> 
> anyway. i played Crimson Flower first and am, thus, very attached to Fleche. rip to rodrigue but her pigtails are cute and i feel bad for her!

She keeps a fake name on the tip of her tongue, every time she comes to a new village, a new inn, a new stranger. But it turns out that these days no one pays another war orphan any mind. All the new eyes pass over her like she’s no one. Part of her is grateful, and part of her is indignant. The rest is numb in the way she always is anymore, when she can’t be angry.

She hears rumors of the maiden who made an attempt on His Majesty’s life. That’s all they say: just a maiden. If anyone whispers the name Fleche von Bergliez, she doesn’t hear it. So she locks her false name and the true one in the same place inside herself. Neither of them matter much anymore anyway.

Still, she hides well. She trains herself to make the right faces when she hears of Kingdom victories or Empire losses, to remember how to smile. When she hears the king’s name she doesn’t spit at it. She dyes her hair dark at the first town where she can find the means. In the washbasin a stranger looks back at her with reproach. 

She couldn’t even kill him and now she can’t curse him either?

Escape has made a spy of her when she should be a warrior. She should have died on that silent Kingdom commander’s blade. She should spit on that bastard _Dimitri’s_ name, damn the consequences. 

But the piece of her that speaks with her brother’s voice still wants to live.

Tonight’s inn is typically shabby. No one gives her a second look as she carefully counts out her coins to buy a room. She’ll be camping in another week if she can’t come up with any more. There’s not much she remembers how to do other than fight, and she’d rather starve than fight for these bastards. 

She eats the bread the innkeep’s wife gives her. She washes her face. She keeps her eyes closed as she does it, so she doesn’t have to see who looks back at her.

Just as the sun is setting, the comforting background chatter from downstairs stops suddenly, and then explodes into chaos. If Randolph were here he would go down and look himself, cautioning her to stay back. She would creep along behind him and peek over his shoulder, and be scolded for it later. But he isn’t here. There’s a chance that if she goes herself she’ll be recognized. 

The hungry ache in her ribs wants to live, so that someday, perhaps, it can be satisfied. So she stays where she is.

The commotion grows quiet. She hears boots on the stairs.

When the door is kicked in, she’s pressed to the wall beside it, axe at the ready. She turns and brings it down without taking the time to look; it crashes against the metal of a shield with a dull clang, the impact reverberating up and through her arms. She staggers back, legs shaking.

The man lowers his shield, his sword already drawn. His eyes flash when he sees her. There’s a wildness in them that’s familiar. He goes for her with a roar.

She swings her axe again. It’s heavier than what she’s used to; she had to leave her own silver axe behind when she joined the Kingdom’s army. 

The swordsman parries her easily. She tries to dart out of the way of his returning strike, but it catches her in the arm, a shallow stinging cut. “You,” he says, as her blood drips from his blade. “I remember you from the monastery.”

She remembers him too, from Garreg Mach and from what Randolph told her of the discussions he had at the Emperor’s war table. Duke Fraldarius’s only living son: formidable in battle, useless at diplomacy, loyal until death. 

That’s where she’s seen his eyes before. But when Rodrigue Fraldarius fell, his eyes were placid. He was hardly even scared. He certainly wasn’t _angry_. His son is furious. His son, she knows, will never stop until she’s dead.

She lunges forward. Her axe meets his shield instead of skin, and it breaks with a sickening crack. She stumbles with the aftershocks, and the next sweep of his blade cuts into her stomach. At once she realizes it’s too deep. He knocks her down like it’s nothing, pressing a booted foot against her sternum. His sword is at her throat.

It hurts. She stares up at him, breathing shallowly. He’s being stupid. If he means to kill her he should do it. Waiting is only wasting time. Someone is going to steal his chance from him, like his father stole it from her.

He looks a mess. She knows she does too; tangled unnaturally dark hair, dirt and blood on her skin, that same wildness to her eyes. But she slept last night. From the shake in his hand, the circles under his eyes, the new Duke Fraldarius might not have done so in weeks.

“My father is dead because of you,” he says in a battle steady voice. “You tried to murder the king.” His blade moves, forcing her head back. “Do you have anything to say for yourself before your execution?”

“So what,” she spits. “My brother is dead because of your filthy _king_. Haven’t you heard the rumors? Didn’t you see him? That man is a monster. He ripped my brother apart.” She’s seen it every night since, every time she sleeps. The beast tearing into her brother. Every morning, she wakes up smelling blood, copper coating her throat.

His sword wavers. “What?”

“General Randolph. Do any of you even care? Do you not remember? You captured him. He came back to us in pieces. It was that monster, I know it was, he warned me before he left—”

Fraldarius stares down at her. His eyes are cold and clear. “I’ve seen exactly what the beast is capable of,” he says. He almost takes a step back, but then seems to remember himself. Shaky, off-balance. “But he Dimitri didn’t kill Randolph von Bergliez. Is that why—”

She lurches up, hissing through her teeth. He doesn’t move his boot. “Was it you?”

“No,” he says evenly. “Not that it would matter.”

She bares her teeth at him. “Of course it matters.”

“We’re at war,” snaps Fraldarius. “Anyone could have killed him. He’s dead. He’ll always be dead. What did you expect?”

“He promised. He promised me he would come back, and he didn’t because of _you_.”

“I told you,” says Fraldarius. He lowers his sword. “I had nothing to do with your brother’s death. And neither did the king, neither did my father. Does _that_ matter to you?”

She laughs. It hurts horribly. Somewhere along the line, she’s pretty sure she broke a rib. “Why should it matter whose hand was on the blade? He’s dead. He’s gone. I’ll never forgive any of you.” He’s shifted a bit of his weight off her. She rolls out from under his foot, going up on her knees with the dagger from her boot clutched in her hand. She only needs one good strike. 

He catches her wrist easily. He bends it back carefully, not so far that it snaps, but enough that she can’t think about anything else. 

Distantly, she becomes aware that she’s crying. She doesn’t know when she started. 

“Your brother is dead,” says the Duke. His gaze is so heavy she thinks it might crush her. He doesn’t sound like a warrior now. He sounds like a lost child. He sounds like the girl she used to be, the girl her brother lied to when he made that promise. His boot has left a red footprint on the dusty inn floor. “What—what do you think would be different if Dimitri was dead too?”

“Everything,” she says. “How can you not understand? _Everything_.” She closes her eyes, sways in his grip. She should have died two weeks ago. She should have died with her blade in the king’s heart. But still, she’ll die like Randolph did; this will have to do.

The last bite of steel never comes. He lets her go. She tries to stand up. She staggers. She falls. Meanwhile, Fraldarius walks to the room’s tiny window. He leans out and whistles sharply. Then he comes back, and sits down on the floor beside her, where she’s curled around herself. 

Fraldarius doesn’t reach out to her. He doesn’t even look at her, his gaze fixed on something she can’t see. “Tell me about your brother,” he says. 

Above her the room wavers, grows intermittently dark. Her hands over her stomach are wet with blood. All he’s doing is killing her slowly, and she hates him then as much as she’s ever hated anyone: the king and his father and his country. 

But still, Fleche does.

-

If Sylvain were a slightly worse friend, or maybe a much better one, he would’ve told Felix to deal with his own corpses. But friends don’t let friends go on harebrained revenge missions alone, and they don’t let them bury bodies alone either. And also, embarrassingly, Sylvain is eternally cursed to come when Felix calls. 

So he climbs the stairs of the inn, after a short detour to pay off the innkeep. They’re in Kingdom territory, but only barely. Felix, of course, gave no thought to this particular political issue or any other. But it will be better if this little visit goes unremarked upon. Bad enough that they left the front lines for two weeks, and that the professor is the only one who knows where they’ve gone. “Reconnaissance” is the official story. Like anyone is going to believe _that_ once Felix comes back with murder in his eyes. Like Felix will be able to lie to Dimitri’s face about it.

But that’s a problem for future Sylvain, a poor bastard that the Sylvain of today has always pitied. For now, he braces himself. After three seconds of imagining the worst as a nice little aperitif, he pushes past the door that’s hanging off its hinges. 

Felix doesn’t have a scratch on him. He’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring at the sword held across his lap. His shield’s next to him on the ground, and on his other side is the girl who nearly killed the king, absolutely covered in blood. But hey: she’s breathing. 

“So I take it this whole thing didn’t go as planned.”

Felix looks up at him with his dim lamplight eyes. “Fix her,” he says.

“Just to be clear,” Sylvain says, “you’re definitely the one who stabbed her, right?”

“We don’t have time for this, Sylvain.”

“Yeah.” Sylvain talks slowly, just in case it helps. “You gave her a gut wound. She’s gonna die. Which, as I understand it, was the point of the last two weeks we spent tramping through the mud and not, you know, fighting the war we kind of need to win?”

Felix glares up at him. His hand tightens on his sword, not like he’s going to draw it or anything. Just a fun little reflex he has when anyone tells him something he doesn’t like. 

Sylvain sighs. “I’m not much of a healer, Felix.”

“Just stop her from bleeding out.”

Felix says jump, Sylvain calls him an idiot and then asks how high. What else is new. Also, his dad just died, so fine. Sylvain kneels down on the bloody floor and yanks off his gauntlets. “I’ve never seen you get cold feet before,” he says, as he leans in to assess the damage. 

Felix doesn’t rise to the bait, which is worrying. He’s watching Sylvain’s hands. Felix isn’t squeamish about blood; Goddess knows he can’t be, considering how much of it all of them have spilled. Sylvain personally was very much not into blood until about age nine, when for various reasons, all of them with the last name Gautier, he had to pretend to get over it. And like with so many things, eventually the pretending became the truth. 

He presses his hands to the kid’s stomach, does his best, and tries not to think about how intently Felix is watching Sylvain fix something that he broke.

“So,” says Sylvain at length. “Do you want me to ask or will I get stabbed for that too?”

“She thought Dimitri killed her brother,” says Felix. “That’s why she did it.”

“Did he?” Dimitri’s probably killed dozens of people’s brothers at this point. But who’s counting.

“No. Do you remember that Imperial general that the boar wanted to rip apart? The professor executed him before he had the chance. My father was—disturbed.”

“I remember,” Sylvain says. Dimitri talking about gouging some poor bastard’s eyes out? A common enough sight these days, sure, but still not one Sylvain’s ever going to forget. 

“Stupid,” Felix says. “She couldn’t even find the right target.”

“Yeah.” Sylvain doesn’t look up from his work. “She’s the one being stupid.”

“What do you want from me, Sylvain? You thought this was a bad idea the whole time.” Testy, now, which is a lot better than bleak. Felix is like those blades he loves so much. He needs to be kept sharp; he needs to cut. When he gets clumsy and dull, that’s when Sylvain starts to get scared.

“And I was right, wasn’t I?” The girl stirs as Sylvain heals her, but doesn’t wake. Probably for the best. She looks like shit anyway, hole in her gut aside.

“At least I know who killed my fucking father.”

His voice breaks on the very last word. Sylvain faces him then. Felix looks almost as bad as the girl, though at least he has the good sense not to dye his hair. He’s put his sword aside and drawn his knees up, arms wrapped tight around them. He used to do that when he was a kid. Sit like this and cry and cry and cry. But back then he’d let Sylvain hug him. Sylvain’s not willing to risk it right now, not when Felix still has a sword within reach.

“Yeah,” Sylvain says. “You do. She’s right here. What are we going to do about that?”

“I don’t know,” Felix says, wretched, like it wasn’t his idea to find her. Like Sylvain didn’t find him saddling a horse— _Sylvain’s_ horse, the only one who will tolerate Felix’s inept attempts at riding—and wrangle the plan out of him, such as it was. The professor was too busy trying to save Rodrigue to get the girl who murdered him. So now Felix was going to find her. And sure, fine, if Sylvain wanted to follow him so badly, Felix wasn’t going to bother stopping him. And that was that. They never talked about what was going to happen when they caught up with her. Sylvain assumed the answer was obvious. Apparently, it isn’t. “Drag her back for trial, I guess.”

“Oh, the horses are going to love that.” Dimitri will hate it. _Felix_ will hate it too, even if he doesn’t know it. His father’s death, all the stupid pointless reasons for it, put on display for all to see? Sylvain’s not going to watch that happen to him.

“She’s like Dimitri,” Felix says, rubbing at his face. “She thought she knew who was responsible for her brother’s death, and that became the only thing. I told her she was wrong and it was like it didn’t even matter. I don’t even know if she heard me. The desire for revenge turned her into—nothing. A beast. Just like Dimitri. She didn’t hear reason. She can’t.”

“What, you’re not convinced a thirteen year old girl was responsible for the Tragedy of Duscur?” Sylvain says. “And here I thought I was the only one.”

“Like it matters now.” Felix looks down at the girl. “Maybe it would be easier if I was. If Glenn’s killer had a face like my father’s.” He scrubs at his eyes. “I shouldn’t have come.”

Sylvain sighs. It’s never good if Felix is admitting someone else was right, even obliquely. He shifts to kneel in front of him, taking Felix’s face in his hands, smearing the girl’s blood across his cheeks. He tilts up Felix’s chin until his eyes are on Sylvain. “You’re a real piece of work, Felix Fraldarius, but you’re not Dimitri.”

Felix shudders, when Sylvain presses his lips to his forehead, and then he really starts to cry, snotty and awful like when they were kids. Sylvain’s been with him almost every waking second since Rodrigue fell. He’d believe it’s the first time he’s cried since it happened.

“She’ll live,” Sylvain says into his hairline. He wraps his arms around him and Felix lets him; Felix clings to him like the past fifteen years are nothing, like half his family isn’t dead for a boy he doesn’t want to believe in, who he’ll still follow anywhere. 

-

Fleche wakes to a pounding head and an awful ache across her stomach. She dreamed of Randolph, the last time he defeated her in a training match before they marched on the Kingdom, laughing heartily as he pulled her back up from the ground. 

In the shifting moment between the dream and the present, she thinks she’s dead too. To have the relief of that pulled out from under her hurts more than any of the rest. 

At least this time the blood she smells is real.

A soldier is sprawled out in the room’s only chair, looking at a map and scrawling something on a piece of parchment. He doesn’t react when she sits up. Her axe is useless, but Fraldarius’s sword is three feet away from her on the ground.

Duke Fraldarius himself is restlessly asleep on the bed, covered in a coat clearly too big for him. 

“You should get out of here before he wakes up,” says the soldier in bored tones. She places him, finally, as the Gautier heir. His battalion’s figurine on the war table, according to Randolph, had been a horse with a mane as red as flames. “If he changes his mind again I might strangle him, but he’ll probably stab you first.”

She looks to the sword. 

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” says Gautier. 

“Why not.” Her voice sounds like a rusted axe. She’s still a mess, but most of the blood has dried. When she presses her hand to her stomach, she finds only a ropy, uneven scar.

Gautier waggles his fingers at her. “Don’t worry, you don’t have to thank me.”

She goes for the sword. Gautier doesn’t stop her. She gets to her feet, holding it out in front of herself unsteadily. It’s never been her preferred weapon. Maybe if she’d had an axe on hand when she made her attack, the Kingdom would be without a leader. Her brother wouldn’t be haunting her. She could finally sleep, dreamless.

“You know, you and Felix have a lot in common,” says Gautier. “You have to come at everything swordfirst. Always pointing at something. I’m always telling him it’ll kill him, but he’s not the type to listen.”

“I’m not interested in taking advice from the Kingdom.”

“Guess not,” says Gautier. He stands, exaggeratedly casual. “You know, I am so sick and tired of this war.”

“So surrender.” This is something Randolph would have said, but Fleche gets the tone all wrong. She doesn’t sound boasting or cheerful. She sounds desperate. 

“There’s a warrant out for your arrest. Felix thinks he wants to take you back with us.”

“I thought he came to kill me.” 

“Yeah, well, that makes two of us.” A shadow crosses Gautier’s face. “You got lucky, kid. His brother’s dead too. So is mine, actually, so I guess that makes us a matching set. But I didn’t like mine all that much, so stop pointing that thing at me like you’re going to use it. I won’t hesitate to skewer you if I have to, but believe me when I say I’d really rather not.”

“Why?” Fleche demands. It feels like the only thing she ever says anymore, the only thing she ever thinks. Why did Randolph have to die; why did they have to fight at all; why isn’t it _over_ yet? Fleche’s experience of injury has always been of a burst of intense pain followed by a sore but steady recovery. She has never felt a wound like this. It only seems to hurt more every day, an ache as all-consuming as Fraldarius bending back her wrist. Randolph is dead, and he always will be. The Duke was right about that. Randolph will always be dead; how could anything else ever matter? 

“Because I need you to do something for me,” says Gautier. “I need you to deliver a message to the Emperor. And you can’t do that if you’re dead.”

“A message,” says Fleche. She glances down at Fraldarius’s sword. Imagines the sweeping strike Randolph would make into Gautier’s space. He has a lance, some horrible construction of metal and bone, but it’s leaning against the wall. It would take him a minute to put his hands on it. 

“What’s the last thing your brother said to you?” asks Gautier.

“What?”

“The very last thing. I know you remember. My brother, he told me to hurry up and die, and then I killed him. And then some other stuff happened, but that’s not really the point. The point is—I didn’t know your brother. Frankly, I have no idea what he would have wanted.” Gautier is looking at her, but his gaze is hooded. Fleche doesn’t think she’s what he’s seeing. “But you were lucky. He loved you. I heard it from the professor. In his last moments, he said he fought for his family. So I think you owe it to him to do the same. If you need something to aim for, try that.” He shrugs. “Or come at me, and maybe you’ll die here after all and waste all my hard work. Felix will be pissed he missed it. But if not, I’ve got a letter here that needs delivering. Might even be the key to ending the war.” 

He picks up the parchment he was writing on, shaking it out to dry the last of the ink before he seals it. He turns his back on her to do it. 

When he faces her again, she still hasn’t moved. “Well?”

She approaches him cautiously, sword at the ready. She takes the letter.

Fraldarius is still sleeping like the dead. Gautier laughs when he sees her looking at him. “You know what?” he says, stretching his arms behind his neck. “As long as you get that letter to the right place, I’ll even let you keep the sword. He’ll be furious.” He drops his arms and the smile. “Don’t let me see you again, though,” he says. “I won’t spare you a second time.”

“I thought you didn’t want to kill me.”

“I don’t,” says Gautier. “But if it’s that or make Felix go through any of that again, then sorry, sweetheart. That’s not a fight you’re going to win.”

Fleche doesn’t make his mistake as she leaves. She doesn’t turn her back on him. He isn’t even watching her, anyway. He’s watching Fraldarius with an expression of such horrible tenderness that it nearly makes her flinch.

She’s a week into Empire territory before curiosity gets the better of her. She pries the letter open with the edge of her dagger.

She reads it through once, and then twice. And for a moment afterwards, she thinks she’s crying again, bitterly, the way she did after Randolph died. But she isn’t. Fleche just forgot what it felt like to laugh.

-

Felix wakes slowly, like it’s peacetime, and that’s how Sylvain knows that he made the right mistake. He’ll do anything, if it means he can give Felix even a moment of something so close to peace.

It doesn’t last long, obviously. Felix sits up, looking furiously about the room. Sylvain, sprawled out on his back next to him on the bed, stretches ostentatiously. “Morning, sunshine.”

“Where is she,” Felix says, a flat demand, like his eyes aren’t still red from how harshly he’d sobbed. 

Sylvain shrugs. “Halfway to the Empire by now if she has any sense.”

Felix stumbles from the bed, going for his sword. When he realizes it’s gone, he turns to Sylvain, enraged. 

“I gave her a letter for Edelgard.” He’s not even nervous as he eyes Felix. He just feels tired. That’s what he would have written, if he’d really been writing to Edelgard: _aren’t you tired_? 

But the letter wasn’t for her, it was for the girl, wanted every soldier in the Kingdom, and hopefully she’ll be out of Felix’s reach by the time she realizes. Hopefully she won’t kill too many Kingdom soldiers with her freedom. Sylvain’s hands are already soaked in blood by now, sure; but unfortunately, if there’s a point when fresh blood stops mattering, he hasn’t reached it yet. 

Hopefully Felix will ever speak to him again, although looking at his face now, blank the way he gets during a fight, that might be the least likely outcome of all.

“And what about my sword?”

“Sorry,” Sylvain says flatly. “She’d die out there without a weapon, you know.”

Felix makes a noise that would pleasantly remind Sylvain of how he used to squawk when he got pissed off as a kid, if it didn’t precede him lurching for the Lance of Ruin, wrapping his fingers around it. Not much time for nostalgia, not with the way the sight makes Sylvain’s blood run cold. 

Sylvain sits up, hand reaching out uselessly, all of him tense. “Put that down,” he says in a voice he barely recognizes. And for a moment they just stare at each other. Felix’s form is horrible, he has no idea how to hold a lance properly, and that’s probably not even why his arms are shaking.

Sylvain spends a lot of time hating the Lance of Ruin. It’s one of his favorite pastimes. But for all the nights he’s spent fantasizing about crushing it to powder, he’s never hated it more than he does in this moment. 

“Why?” Felix asks, and his voice would hurt less if it trembled. “Why did you let her go?”

Sylvain turns away from him. If he has to see that fucking lance in Felix’s hands for another second he’ll do something stupid, and then all of this will have been for nothing. He looks instead at the tiny window of the inn, the one Felix had leaned out of to whistle for him after he ran a girl through and then stumbled back from her with blood on his sleeves, frantically thinking of how to fix her.

The real answer is so obvious that if Felix isn’t seeing it, then he doesn’t want to. So Sylvain offers him something close enough to the truth. “Don’t you get tired of it? Killing and killing and killing? Don’t you ever just want to _save_ someone?”

“She killed my father.”

And it will turn Felix to ash to watch her die. He didn’t see himself last night, pale and shaking and hating himself with a ferocity he usually only reserves for Dimitri. “She did.” Sylvain turns back to him and smiles, spreading his arms wide. “That’s probably treason, right? Letting her go? So drag me back in her stead if you want. I won’t make trouble for you. You can keep the lance until we get back to the professor if you want, but put it down.”

Felix stares at him for so long that Sylvain’s cheeks start to ache with the effort of keeping the smile up. 

His eyes flicker to the Lance of Ruin, just once. And then Felix sneers, disgusted with something. The weapon or himself or Sylvain, it really could be any of them.

He drops the lance with a clatter and turns away. 

“Get the horses ready,” he says, already stalking to the door. “We have to meet back up with the main force. We’ve been away too long already. Who knows what the boar has been doing without us.”

And off Felix goes, aimed true. Sylvain spares one last thought for the miserable lonely girl he set loose upon the world. Hopefully she can find something to look toward. Maybe it won’t even be Edelgard. Maybe Sylvain won’t stand across from her on another battlefield someday and see her kill a friend of his and think: great, now there’s something else that’s my fault.

Maybe he will, maybe he won’t. It doesn’t really matter, not now. What matters is that Felix is here, and not already miles away, looking for that girl. What matters is his fingers twitching, opening and closing into a fist in a way that makes Sylvain sure he’ll never pick up the lance again. What matters is that he looks over his shoulder as he reaches the door, and he meets Sylvain’s eyes. “Hurry up.”

“Yeah, yeah,” says Sylvain, and he leaves the inn smiling.

**Author's Note:**

> no i don't know what is up with this fic either but i did NOT want it in my g docs anymore. find me on twitter at luckydicekirby. sometimes i say things!


End file.
